Holocaust literature in different languages

The books selected here offer a range of topics covering many different sides of Holocaust memory. The books chosen were written in numerous languages to offer a wide variety of perspectives and frames. We encourage you to follow your journey by engaging with numerous other books existing that will expand your understanding of the Shoah.

Holocaust through art and literature - per language (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and German).

ENGLISH: NIGHT (ELIE WIESEL)

In 1960, world-renowned philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote Night, reflecting on his experiences alongside his father in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944 and 1945. He writes about the ‘death of God,’ his disgust of society and humanity, the flip in parent-child relations as his father’s health deteriorated, and becoming a resentful teenage caretaker.

The book has since been translate into 30 languages and ranks as one of the foundational literature pieces on the Holocaust. Night is the first book in a set of three: Night, Dawn, and Day. The later two books focus on Wiesel’s transitioning back into the real word after experiericing the horrors of the Holocaust.

GERMAN: DREI LEBEN : ERINNERGRUNGEN (MAX MANNMEINHER)

Max Mannheimer spends a carefree youth in a small town in Moravia. From the mid-1930s, the first signs of a political upheaval were noticeable there. In October 1938 the Sudetenland was “annexed” and the German armed forces invaded. The old life is over. Together with many other Jews, the family is forced to leave their homeland and look for a new home, as restrictions and harassment increase. In 1943, they are deported to Auschwitz. The parents, three siblings and Mannheimer’s wife are murdered. He and his younger brother survived further deportations to the Warsaw and Dachau concentration camps. After the liberation, their third life begins. Max Mannheimer starts a family and for a long time suppresses the period of suffering. After the death of his second wife, who worked for the resistance, he writes down his memories of the Holocaust.

FRENCH: UN SAC DE BILLES (JOSEPH JOFFO)

Translated into 18 languages, “A bag of marbles”, a book of exceptional quality, is one of the greatest bookstores successes of the last ten years. A very beautiful book, moving and strong ... Alphonse Boudard. This book, which is the book of fear, of anguish, of suffering, could also have been the book of hatred, but it is, in the end, a cry of hope and love. Bernard Clavel. Among the countless testimonies devoted to the accursed times, this one is unique, by the nature of the experience, the emotion, the cheerfulness, the childish pain. And told in such a way, pain seizes, draws, carries the reader from page to page, to the last line. Joseph Kessel. A spontaneity, a humor, a tenderness, a discreet emotion that make it a book like no other. The cross.

HEBREW: OUT OF THE DEPTHS (RABBI ISRAEL MEIR LAU)

Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis’ deadliest concentration camps and how he managed to survive against all possible odds. Lau, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, also chronicles his life after the war, including his immigration to Mandate Palestine during a period that coincides with the development of the State of Israel. The story continues up through today, with that once-lost boy of eight now a brilliant, charismatic and world-revered figure who has visited with Popes John Paul and Benedict; the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and countless global leaders including Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair. Also includes a foreword by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.

SPANISH: PARA ETENDER EL HOLOCAUSTO (GABRIEL ALBIAC)

In this book, the Holocaust is approached from different spheres: the teacher, the journalist ... For this, together with Sánchez Tortosa a group of intellectuals (Raúl Fernández Vitores, Alberto Almodóvar and Fernando Palmero) is formed with the aim of raising awareness among the citizenship about what the Holocaust was and what can happen once we let oblivion do its job. These days you can visit an exhibition on Auschwitz in Madrid, which under the motto “Not long ago. Not too far” reviews, with more than 600 original objects from the largest of the Nazi camps, the horrors of Nazism.

RUSSIAN: BABI YAR: A DOCUMENT IN A FORM OF A NOVEL (ANATOLY KUZNETSOV) БАБИЙ ЯР (NAME IS RUSSIAN). “Everything in this book is true.”

Anatoly Kuznetsov was a 12-year-old living in Kiev, Ukraine, when the Germans occupied the city in 1941. His age allowed him to escape the notice of Nazi perpetrators and local collaborators as he observed the war crimes committed against Jews, Roma, Ukrainian nationalists, and Soviet prisoners of war. More than 33,700 people lost their lives in a two-day massacre, followed by as many as 66,000 over the next two years.

At 14, Kuznetsov began writing about what he had seen, later supplementing his manuscript with survivor and eyewitness testimony, supporting documents, and the efforts of the Soviet government to conceal any trace of the atrocities perpetrated at Babi Yar. The serialized book was published in the USSR only after extensive censorship, but Kuznetsov converted the original full text to film and smuggled it out of Russia when he defected.

Now restored to its original condition, Babi Yar offers a unique, multi-faceted perspective of some of the darkest days of the Holocaust, written by a surviving witness.